The Empire's New Clothes: Paradigm Lost, and Regained 0972819673, 9780972819671

Citation preview

IS

search brary

PRICKLY A PARADIGM PRESS

Prickly Paradigm Press, L L C is the North American successor of Prickly Pear Press, founded in Britain by Keith Hart and Anna Grimshaw in 1993. Prickly Paradigm aims to follow their lead in publishing challenging and sometimes outrageous pamphlets, not only on anthropology, but on other academic disciplines, the arts, and the contemporary world. Prickly Paradigm is marketed and distributed by T h e University of Chicago Press. www.press.uchicago.edu A list of current and future titles, as well as contact addresses for all correspondence, can be found on our website and at the back of this pamphlet. www.prickly-paradigm.com Executive Publisher Marshall Sahlins Publishers Peter Sahlins Ramona Naddaff Bernard Sahlins Seminary Co-op Bookstore Editor Matthew Engelke [email protected] Design and layout by Bellwether Manufacturing.

B O S T O N P U B L I C L I B R A R Y

TheE.

K O T 8 0 9 3

U

8

!

W

j

T h e Empire's N e w

Clothes:

Paradigm Lost, and Regained

Harry Harootunian

PRICKLY PARADIGM PRESS CHICAGO

x

© 2004 Harry Harootunian All rights reserved. Prickly Paradigm Press, L L C 5629 South University Avenue Chicago, II 60637 www.prickly-paradigm.com ISBN: 0-9728196-7-3 L C C N : 2004112108 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

"But we must return... to the most important promise made by modernization: its evenness. Modernization is even because it holds within itself a theory of spatial and temporal convergence: all societies will come to look like us, all will arrive eventually at the same stage or level, all the possibilities of the future are being lived now, at least for the West: there they are, arrayed before us, a changeless world functioning under the sign of technique... Modernization promises a perfect reconciliation of past and future in an endless present, a world where all sedimentation of social experience has been leveled or smoothed away, where poverty has been reabsorbed, and, most important, a world where class conflict is a thing of the past, the strains of contradiction washed out in a superhuman hygienic effort, by new levels of abundance and equitable distribution." Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies "Above all, the new concepts offered hope. No doubt Africa had never invented the wheel, no doubt Asian religions were fatalist, no doubt Islam preached submission, no doubt Latins combined racial miscegenation with a lack of entrepreneurial thrift; but it could now be asserted that these failings were not biological, merely cultural. And if, like the Japanese, the underdeveloped were clever enough to invent an indigenous version of Calvinism, or if they could be induced to change the content of their children's readers (the children first being taught to read, of course), or if transistors were placed in remote villages, or if farsighted elites mobilized benighted masses with the aid of altruistic outsiders, or if..., then underdevelopment too would cross the river Jordan and come into a land flowing with milk and honey. This was the hope offered up by the modernization theorists." Immanuel Wallerstein, "Modernization: requiescat in pace11

I: P A R A D I G M ' S

EMPIRE

T h e purpose of this little book is admirably condensed in the two opening quotations. I would like to situate m y observations on modernization theory between them and consider the paradigm's history as it was formulated in the early years of the Cold W a r to eventually authorize an agenda for developing the nonaligned nations of the old East and the new South that had just recently emerged from decolonization. During these years immediately after the conclusion of World W a r II, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a titanic contest to win the allegiance of new nation states to their respective models of modernity and development. As a theory of social

change, modernization thrust the social sciences, at least in the United States, onto a world stage these disciplines had n o t previously known that led to designing a methodological program based on comparison. By the same measure the formation of a theory of modernizing new societies (those that had n o t yet attained some requisite level of modernity) implicated social scientists, on a scale never before imagined, in state policy to become what the historian Loren Baritz once named the "servants of power." W i t h an undying faith in the instrumentality of a means/end rationality, itself never far from its source in economic theory, social science envisaged how newly emerged nations might be able to modernize peacefully, especially after the often traumatic passage out of colonization, rather than through an alternative strategy that recommended revolutionary violence to overcome the distance between their current circumstances and the rich industrial societies of EuroAmerica. T h e developmentalism contrived to transform "traditional" societies into modern, rational nations was principally spearheaded by the effort to induce newly founded nations, usually forrrier colonies, to fashion their societies in such a way as to be receptive to American products, even though its ideological representation invariably projected a benevolently altruistic and liberal desire to offer a "helping hand." T h e programs aimed to persuade new nations to commit their political economies to marketization and democratization with often disastrous results. W h a t was at the heart of modernization theory and its

promise for practical application, and why its exemplars are still relevant to understanding the current situation, was the desire to promote political stabilization among the new nations after decolonization as a condition for implementing economic development fueled by the market. W h i l e marketization invariably swelled the wealth of a minority, democratization enfranchised whole populations only to put control back into the hands of elites (often linked to the rich), as the case of Japan's long-standing "single-party democracy" amply demonstrates. Japan, of course, is the one country that had been constantly held u p as the most successful model of capitalist modernization of "late-comer" nations in the "free-world." T h i s imaginary was produced by^social scientists and historians in the 1960s and 1970s, with generous support from America's leading philanthropic foundations, who thus created a large literature determined to showing how the Japanese experience conformed to normative theories of social change and conceptions of development. I will turn to this literature later and examine how its claims of political stabilization and economic growth were made to appear as exemplary experiences worthy of emulation by unaligned societies in the era of the Cold War. T h e advantage of the Japanese example over the model of American society was clearly its location in Asia and its geographic (though n o t temporal) proximity to the T h i r d World. Even attempts to adjust the rate of marketization and democratization, in order to allow time for the adaptation to, and absorption of, necessary change, by envisaging stages of tutelage and tran-

sition, failed to keep in check the very excesses the paradigm of modernization was supposed to eliminate from tradition-bound societies. T h e disparity between the signature of modernity, namely a developmental program bringing about capitalist consumption, and the local circumstance this -was designed to transform could never actually be closed or even directly acknowledged, despite the well meaning efforts of liberal social science in those years. W h a t modernization discourse managed to accomplish was a displacem e n t of capitalism by something called "modernity" and the processes'conceived for realizing it. A good deal of theory was expended in an attempt t o show that modernity, as opposed to merely capitalism, meant satisfying a rational outlook that would lead to a greater control of nature, differentiation and specialization as preconditions for the even greater integration of society. W h o s e rationality and for w h o m were questions never asked. Wallerstein recognized early on that the -world of the postwar was n o t about achievement, as such, but profit. But once "achievement" was fixed as both the law of rationality and t h e criterion of the modernizing process, social sciences rushed to establish comparisons of incommensurable magnitude as the standard of measurement, even though the instance of unevenness n o t only derived from the extension of capitalism but was necessary for its continual reproduction. It was less the absence of exercising a means/end rationality successfully that dogged the modernizing efforts of new nations and kept them permanently from reaching the promised stage of

convergence than the necessity of capitalism to create unevenness as a condition of its own expansion. T h e paradigm of modernization thus provided a checklist for how societies could satisfy a number of requirements to become "modern;" it also told them of their location in the cosmic grid of progress. While this program flourished throughout the Cold War, and was inseparable from it, its commitment to rationality exceeded its conviction in comparative measurement. Once the Cold War ended, social science threw out the bath water but kept the baby, or vice versa, and turned back to a purely formalistic rationality itself, no longer constrained by a concern with culture, society, and history, n o longer in need of comparative frameworks and the action of historically and culturally derived value systems and their differences. T h e only things that seemed to count were preferences and decisions based on either rationally calculated expectations promising a maximization of choice or those that failed to measure up. U n d e r these circumstances, the only worthwhile comparison was one that observed the difference between success or failure, maximizing interest or not, and that comparison could be made anywhere in a world "unified" by capitalism. Finally, I want also to suggest that even though modernization as a theory of social change disappeared with the closing down of competition and the collapse of the Soviet Union, it has reappeared in the guise of a celebratory new imperialism of rational achievements now attributed to the historical empires and the lessons they hold for the contemporary American imperium. But before we specify this

connection it is important to provide an account of what might be called the imperial return in the current circumstances of contemporary history.

II: T A I L I N G

EMPIRE

Since 9/11, there has been a quickening of the return of imperialism in popular discourse and an ever increasing circulation of terms like "empire" in newspapers, T V talk shows, and even drama describing America's gurrent global involvements. Although an awareness of American imperial aspirations had already been recorded by critics and commentators before the fateful destruction of the World Trade Center in N e w York City, the recent and aggressive re-surfacing of imperialism as both an older, historical category and as a concept and description employed in contemporary political discussion and scholarly opinion constitutes an event of such overdeterrnined magnitude that it is now threatening to exceed even 9/11 as a symptom of what it says about our current situation. Everywhere one turns these days imperialism and empire seem to crop up. As far as I know, empire and imperialism have n o t yet been appropriated for naming a new perfume. Rather, their ubiquity is more reminiscent of the return of the repressed, what had always l^een there But hidden in the recesses of the political and cultural unconscious, lurking in nameless anonymity yet ready to explode to remind us of what we had "forgotten." N o t too long ago, during the now barely remembered Gulf W a r of 1990-91, it was rare to see political commentary and analyses resort to "the category of imperialism to explain American military intervention to save what all agreed was little more than a Kuwaiti gas station, even

though the rhetoric constantly insisted that the U.S. forces had been deployed to save democracy in a monarchical form from Iraqi oppression. Unsurprisingly, the same appeal to the imperative of democratization is making the rounds again to legitimate American purpose in Iraq and Afghanistan as templates, albeit as yet incomplete ones, for structural change throughout the entire region. But this proclamation echoes an earlier sentiment that demanded programs of development, materialized in offering aid and assistance exported to uncommitted new nations of the T h i r d World during the Cold War. It might be recalled that the explicit goal of developmentalism sought to yoke capitalist economic growth with political democracy, linking the two as a natural coupling and thus defining the vocation of developm e n t itself which aimed to concretize an elaborate theory of modernization and convergence designed by American social science in the immediate post-war years. T h e willingness to use military force was never far from the desire to realize this mission and the "imperial" dictates of the modernizing paradigm which war in Vietnam amply illustrated. I will return to explaining its figuration later but for now it is important to say more about the contemporary discussion on imperialism and empire. Part of this renewed interest in imperialism and the status of America's empire n o doubt stems from the decision to intervene in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 to settle the score with the terrorist base that launched the attack. Subsequent drurhbeating by the Bush administration, designed to whip the popula-

tion into a frenzied and patriotic fervor and even hysteria according to color coded "security" emergencies, sought to create unquestioning support for decisive action in a "war on terf orism" that had n o exit or temporal terminus. All'this prefigured the actual invasion of Iraq in M a r c h 2003. In the context of these new military adventures, a context that included criticism leveled by both domestic demonstrations protesting an immanent war and foreign opposition to unilateral action raised by some of the United States' G - 8 partners, it is*not unreasonable to see the implacable drift of war as simply a sign of imperial ambition. Despite the reluctance of left/liberals to voice the iword to describe what Washington has plainly been planning all along (the same kind of squeamishness inhibits the use of "fascism" to label the political form recent policies have'assumed to justify intervention and what recently has been described as the "militarization of everyday life" in the United States), even the Bush administration's principal spokespersons and fellow travelers have had n o qualms in finally calling a spade a spade by labeling the action of the United States as an expression of imperialism in a new register. As early as November 2001 Richard Haass— currently President of the Council of Foreign Relations and at the time soon-to-be appointed director of policy planning in the State Department under President George W . Bush (Bush II)—delivered a now notoriously famous paper titled, "Imperial America." In it he outlined what the United States would have to do to achieve global prominence in the post-Cold W a r

10 era. l b realize a new hegemony, the,United States would be obliged to "re-conceive their role from traditional nation-state to •an,'imperial power.'" Even though Haass assiduously avoided using the term imperialism when describing America^ new global vocation, as if doing so brought a grant of immunity, he wanted, nevertheless, to emphasize that the former (imperial power), unlike the latter (imperialism), implied n o territorial ambitions and commercial exploitation. Indeed, Haass may very well have been thinking of a "benevolent empire" used earlier and elsewhere to portray Japan's oppressive seizure and colonization of Korea after the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05. Like others after him; Haass was proposing that imperial America represented an empire without colonies or, perhaps worse, H a r d t and Negri's acephalic empire of the multitude, whose truncated figure appeared at'about the same m o m e n t to announce the return of empire and offer something for everybody. H e r e is Haas§: The U.S. role would resemble 19th century Great Britain...coercion and force would be the last resort; what was written by John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson 50 years ago about Great Britain that "British policy followed the principle of extending control informally if possible and formally if necessary" could be applied to the American role at the start of the new century. T h e real problem, as he saw it, was to worry about "what to do with a surplus of power-and the

11 many and considerable advantages this confers on the United States." T h i s referenceto surplus reflected, above all else, the inordinate domination of the world's military represented by the United States (40%), its obsessive monopolization of military power that now equals a force greater than the next eight powers put 1 together (and by some measures greater than all countries combined), with a budget equal to the next twelve to fifteen countries. Haas3 probably recognized that in the comparison with the British Empire o f the nineteenth century, American military power appears infinitely greater and better equipped than Britain's paltry overseas strike force. Yet, as he and others constantly remind us, this overwhelming military superiority is designed neither to expropriate territory, as such, nor even to defeat rivals (now that the Soviet Union has been eliminated), seeking n o territorial acquisitions or control of trade routes reminiscent of earlier imperial ventures. Disproportionate military capacity, unmotivated by the desire" for coercion, capable of extending anywhere, sustaining two or three fronts at once, has no'clear and finite objectives that would require its application. Summoning the historical analogy to "normalize" America's imperium has become today one of t h e leading rhetorical devices enabling current discussions on the status of empire. Haass' choice of the British Empire has become the staple of a number of contemporary discourses whose punctual and repetitive airing littering the pages of The New York Times—serving more these days as a willing mouthpiece and stenographer of the state than as a purveyor of "all the news that's fit to print"—-

12 works to remind readers both of the necessity of an American Empire and its developmental imperative to spread democracy everywhere at any cost. Right wing propagandists like Max Boot (a current fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations) and the ideological gun for hire Niall Ferguson openly ape Haass' earlier recommendation by offering reassurances that the current American adventure, like its British model, can be done cheaply. Haass' insistence that the empire is guided neither by a desire to use force n o r an aptitude for territorial acquisition departs from the very model he has embraced, and defies, therefore, both the history produced by the British Empire since the eighteenth century and, as I will show below, the more recent history of America's recuperation of its pattern since the end of World War II. By announcing that the United States has no interest in deploying force unless necessary Haass is, in fact, raising its prospect without enumerating the conditions prompting such a decision. W e know'now, of course, that n o explanation need be given other than the reason of empire itself, which unintentionally confirms the observation made years ago by Nikos Poulantzas, amending a phrase from Max Horkheimer, that "anyone who does n o t wish to -discuss imperialism should stay silent on the subject of fascism." But the force of its reverse is equally true and those who wish to talk about imperialism today cannot remain silent on the question of fascism. T h e vision of America's empire people like Haass have advanced resembles an invisible, moral universe—a cross between Stefan Georg's mystical,

13 "hidden Germany" and H a r d t and Negri's nameless and headless abode of the multitude. Moreover, Haass was worried at the time of his speech that the United States might fail to rise and meet the challenge of seizing this opportunity and thus squander the opportunity to "bring about a world supportive of its interests" by doing too little, too late. T h i s argument for embedding "core interests" as the propelling agent in achieving global economic domination and "democratization" by unimagined military might reiterates the sentiment of Robert Cooper, a Tony Blair loyalist, when he proposed a revival of nineteenth-century distinctions that supplied imperialism with moral and cultural purpose. T h e characteristics he had in mind were those that had differentiated between civilized, barbarian, and savage states but relocated in a revised register of modern and pre-modern, with the postmodern now acting as custodian of civilized conduct and inducing, through direct or indirect subordination, compliance with universal norms and humanistic practices across the breadth of the globe. W h i l e this language relied on an older binary that often evoked earlier associations of civilization and barbarism, it more frequently reflected the imperial idiom of a bygone age and willingly risks what the tender-hearted today refer to as political incorrectness. Cooper's refashioning of older categories into modern and n o n - m o d e r n reverberates with echoes of America's relentless liberal moral mission for modernizing the unaligned new nations in order to win them over for democracy and capitalism during the Cold War epoch. Recalling Haass' reference to the pursuit

14 of embedded core interests, the modernization agenda, as we shall see, had already sought to p r o m o t e the core economic interests of the United States as a developmental imperative. T h i s explains why the Cold W a r seemed so overdetermined in the United States, and why its concept appeared as America's principal export to the rest of the world— especially those countries outside of Euro-America where h o t wars were regularly being fought. Samuel H u n t i n g t o n , n o stranger to modernization theory, has recently reworked this program into the familiar clash of civilizations, while the current mayor of Tokyo, Ishihara Shintaro, has nominated Japan to be the eastern flank of this new imperial formation n o longer devoted to modernizing but to defending t h e core. Huntington's representation situates the United States as the proxy for the West and thus its leading custodian in the forthcoming collision of civilizations, while Ishihara has called the adversaries of order and profit " T h i r d Nations," obviously implying the distant b u t still vivid and discredited figure of the T h i r d World (specifically applied to Second World countries like the People's Republic and N o r t h Korea) and thereby sustaining the diminished anticommunist fervor of the Cold War. As whacky as this scenario seems, it comes very close to the mission the American military is presently committing its energies to realizing. ,For there can be n o denying that the declared war against terrorism simply continues the earlier struggle against underdevelopment and backwardness (renamed barbarism) in the name of m o d e r n civilization. In fact, it is a recuperation of the Cold

15 W a r in a different register and "rubric," as William Grieder has recently observed in The Nation. Irving Kristol—whose apparent five minutes on the left as a student at C C N Y in the last century has qualified h i m to speak endlessly and authoritatively during a lifetime for the right on the dangers he has "experienced"—has proposed the astonishing idea that the United States has become an imperial nation because it has been invited to be so (an argument used widely these days). As Kristol put it a few years ago, "the world wanted it to happen, needed it to happen," by orchestrating a string of "relatively minor crises that could be resolved by.. .American involvement." T h e political commentator Michael Igantieff has n o hesitation propdsing, on every possible occasion, that empire is the only word capable of describing present day America's global entanglements, even though in a recent book he has pulled back somewhat and called it "Empire lite." T h o m a s Friedman, who habitually calls one thing by another name, constantly employs "globalization" in order to displace what plainly looks and quacks like imperialism and older forms of modernization promoted under American tutelage. Andrew Bacevich, a conservative by any count, believes only a "sight-stopping astigmatism" and the aversion to identify naked self-interest prevents us from using the term imperialism to describe what are clearly manifest American aspirations. Finally, in the gallery of usual right wing suspects, the redoubtable and ever available for a fee Richard Perle has referred to the "war on terrorism" as "total war" and by extension "infinite war." T h e last time the concept of "total

16 war" was seriously employed was by the Japanese as they prepared for their own drive for empire in China and Southeast Asia. But as the Japanese so plainly showed, the idea of total war was conceived to mobilize the whole of domestic society and prepare it to wage warfare indefinitely, if necessary, to secure control of an economic zone called the East Asia C o Prosperity Sphere, another name for empire. H e r e is the real meaning of Poulantzas' rephrasing of Horkheimer and its chilling lesson for contemporary American society. Moreover, we know, too, that in this regard "total" or "infinite" war meant preparedness and a willingness to deploy force unilaterally and pre-emptively, as both Japan's war in Pacific Asia and America's attack on Iraq illustrate. W h a t this current imperial return requires is a reconsideration of its meaning in light of an earlier historical experience and its relationship to the contemporary manifestation.

Reawakening to the M e a n i n g of Imperialism W e must be careful n o t to allow ourselves to be recuperated by an optic that sees no further than contemporary or current events. Immediacy cannot provide an instant illumination of the order of events empowered to reveal a larger explanation of what is happening before our eyes. T h i s optic, in and of itself, was perhaps inspired by the categorization of the Cold W a r itself (and the construction-of "international relations" as an academic discipline). Current discussions

17 of America's imperial role, it seems to me, rely too hurridly on the immediate configuration instead of more distantly mediated and mediating associations that might help resituate contemporary history in a broader context. In the present day scramble for meaning, it is possible to observe two responses that derive their force from the immediate political environment and contemporary discussions that seek to move beyond its presentist horizon. Both remind us of an earlier history and the attempts to account for and explain the sources motivating imperialist activity and its larger meaning. Firstly, a Marxian return to the question after a long dormancy that now wishes to identify the structural "dysfunctions" of capital; and secondly what we might call a new, old historicist representation that wants to demonstrate how the experience of prior empires has been more beneficial than hitherto imagined for the future of former colonies. T h e latter representation manages to supply support, directly or indirectly (depending on one's politics), to the trajectory of contemporary American imperialism. While I will say more about this further on, I want to suggest here that its historicist claims fuses a Rankean conviction that judges the intention of earlier imperialists and colonizers to an authoritative confirmation founded on the Hegelian "cunning of reason." In the case of its most extreme practitioner, Niall Ferguson, it is a confident positivism harnessed to the fantasy of a counterfactual "what might have been" that immediately acquires the status of "should be" identified with a "what is." In any case, bad historicisms. But both of these recent exercises to

18 historicize contemporary American imperial adventures constitute a shadowing which, like a private eye, tracks down and even stalks the movements of empire for its meaning. At its heart stands H a r d t and Negri, whose Empire unintentionally plays the swing function (a revolving door effect?) of mediating between both perspectives, inasmuch as it tries to satisfy two contradictory positions. (1) l b t h e Marxian desire to account for the structural dysfunctions of capital that have led to contemporary imperialism, it offers the vision of a different kind of empire, discontinuous from its historical antecedents, with its displacement of economics by politics that shifts discussion over to the domain of sovereignty (and to a Foucauldian preoccupation with "governmentality") to ultimately substitute a revolutionary model for an evolutionary one. But H a r d t and Negri manage only to recuperate an older theory of modernization that is now made to show how "globalization" has diminished the power of the nation-state to the extent that neither the United States nor indeed any other country today "form the center of the imperialist project," as they put it. (2) F o r the celebratory historicist rediscovery of a good, old imperialism and its influentially long term benefits Empire has given the imperial form a new lease on life in the current conjuncture at the same time that it has gotten the U.S. off the hook by refusing to name it. O n occasion H a r d t and Negri's conception of empire comes close to resembling Kautsky's "ultra imperialism," inasmuch as its form constitutes a league-like configuration that incorporates nationstates. Moreover, Empire shares with contemporary

19 discussions of current events an astonishing insensitivity to history, to any historicism, good, bad, or simply indifferent (a strange blindness even for "neoMarxists"). Empire's program has proven to be n o t only out of step with its m o m e n t b u t its projection of an already headless imperial configuration enabled by globalization has merely transferred the older requirements of a once declared dead theory of modernization to a new level of promised convergence—the global completion of the commodity relation. But H a r d t and Negri's book signaled a reawakening to imperialism at the meta-theoretical level, a concern for empire and the imperial formation among the Marxist left. Marxian theories of imperialism, it is worth recalling, had once constituted one of the principal mainstays of the discourse. By the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, bringing with it the rubble of "actually existing socialism" in Eastern Europe, Marxian theories of imperialism had already run their course and played out their productivity. During its long history, Marxian modes of analysis have, I believe, been plagued by a fundamental ambivalence over (and perhaps a contest between) the claims pressed by a theory of modernization that has had difficulty in differentiating between two, often contradictory desires: those centered on the achievem e n t of socialism and those propelled by the desire of "catching up" with capitalism. T h e latter impulse was immensely exacerbated by and during the Cold W a r era and was probably furthered by the exportation of bourgeois-liberal ideas of development and modernization's promise of convergence. T h i s particular

20 move often sacrificed a Marxian critique of the commodity form and its consequences—that is, a critique of the categories of the base of capitalist modernization for one that targeted only their distribution and application. W h a t I mean is that for m o r e than a century, Marxian thought had served a theory of modernization by failing to promote a critique based on evaluating the status of the commodity fetish as the structuring principal of society (what Marx called the "germinal cell") rather than merely its superstructural ideology. W i t h this orientation as a guiding principle, parties and workers' organizations have together contributed to their own integration into capitalist society, all the while seeking to liberate the latter from its anachronisms and structural deficiencies. In the capitalist periphery, from Russia to Africa and Asia, Marxian thought was employed to justify the late modernization of those societies. Traditional Marxists, whether Leninist or social democrats, academicians or revolutionaries, socialists or T h i r d Worldists, promoted the struggle for the redistribution of income, commodities and value, without putting their order of importance into question, at the expense of class conflict. In retrospect, it can probably now be argued that the entirety of the traditional Marxian theoretical program and its practical applications in both the "actually existing socialist" countries and the Western industrial social democracies constituted only an element in the development of commodity society. T h e global crisis of capitalism and globalization itself is nothing m o r e than a fleeting m o m e n t in the advance of capitalism, which pointed

21 to a crisis of Marxism itself. W e must, in any case, envisage Marxian theories of imperialism as an outgrowth of a tendency to project a conception of modernization that will, at the same time, supply a critique capable of competing with the capitalist version. Theories of imperialism were mediated by the historical specificity of these, conflicting demands at any given moment. For our purposes it might be convenient to propose that the production of these theories were distributed between a Luxemburgian emphasis on the role played by the primitive accumulation of capital, the Kautskyan identification of "ultra imperialism," and the Leninist formulation that ratcheted imperialism to the "highest or latest stage of capitalism." T h i s division inevitably generated the conditions for a collision between a view that necessitated geographical and imperial expansion to solve the crisis of surplus (Luxemburg), one that envisioned imperialism leading to an era of peace both in the "national" class struggle and among nation states through the agreements of a world imperial formation (Kautsky), and an analysis that imagined imperialism as a further aggravation of capitalist contradictions on a global scale, in new and intensified form, leading to a new stage of world conflict (Lenin). Yet, all the stake seemed to share was the importance accorded to large-scale structural determinants that would necessitate the construction of a periodization scheme and a proper "stage-ist" chronology that brought in its train "crisis," "economic catastrophism," "contradictions," etc. In all of these theorizations of imperialism, the role of

22 the state remained relatively recessive, as did the question of the reproduction of unevenness as a principal constituent of the capitalist mode of production in the development of imperialism. W h e n Marxists turned to reminking the question of imperialism, at the m o m e n t in the 1990s when it became evident that history had n o t yet evaporated, they revived this structural conceit, and its accompanying assumption that the leading economic elements will disaggregate to bring down the capitalist system. But what writers added to their analyses of structural implosion was the figure of the nation-state, especially its economic role initiating internationalization. W i t h David Harvey, there is the additional recognition of uneven geographic development and the reproduction of capitalism through "accumulation by dispossession," an updating of primitive accumulation. W h a t is so important about recent Marxian reevaluations is the repetition of the explanatory primacy granted-to structural causality and its scheme of periodization. Hence, one current analysis (by Peter Gowan) describes "Washington's Faustian" bid as a bold, global gamble,, stemming from the way in which international monetary and financial relations have been refigured and managed over the past 25 years. Moreover, this redesigning has resulted in specific political choices made by the United States—globalization as "state policy-dependency phenomena"—and the construction of an economic regime to serve as the instrument of economic statecraft and power politics. T h e "Dollar Wall Street Regime" originated in the early 1970s with Nixon's decision to abandon the

23 Brettoh Woods agreement and let the dollar float against other currencies and his willingness to make a deal with the Saudis to drive up the price of oil. Another account put forth by Leo Panitch and Sam Ginden lias demanded the fashioning of a new Marxian theory of imperialism that will exceed the constraints of the older stage-ist narrative and its reliance on inter-imperial rivalry in order to address those factors that have led to "America's informal empire." Specifically, this new theorization, recalling the earlier formulations of Nikos Poulantzas, foregrounds the state's capacity to incorporate rivals in the "imperial chain" and police the globalization process—spreading capitalist social relations everywhere. T h i s strategy shared a family resemblance with an older aspiration prompted by modernization theory during the Cold War. But the state's history in this reincarnation is Idealized in a Neo-Liberal reconfiguration expressed in such devices as "foreign direct investment." Panitch and Ginden, like Gowan, see the critical inaugural m o m e n t of this transmutation in the late 1970s with the "Volcker Shock" which reflected the American state's self-imposed discipfining in a structural adjustment program initiated by the Federal Reserve's decision to establish economic restraints by allowing interest rates to rise to unprecedented levels. For Ellen M . Wood, the new imperial America must be grasped against a backdrop of historical imperialism, to be sure, but is now marked by a global economy whose structural contradictions are sustained by multiple states, in which the extraeconomic force of military power, what she calls

24 "surplus imperialism," has become essential to the expansion of the imperium in a wholly new way. I n a recent book on "neo-imperialism," David Harvey concentrates on capitalism's cycle of accumulation crises (recurring surplus labor power and capital), once resolved by what he has described as the "spatial fix"—geographical expansion, now stemming from overproduction since the 1970s. In this connection Peter Gowan has also seen the same m o m e n t and the orchestration of volatility by the! U.S. as "a desperate attempt to preserve its hegemonic position which, according to Wood, would explain the obsessive monopolization of military power that has taken place in the last decades of the twentieth century. Harvey has called the tactic motoring an accelerated imperialism—one that belongs to the order of finance capital rather than mere territorial expropriation—"accumulation by dispossession," a term that retains much of Luxemburg's conception of "primitive accumulation." "Accumulation by dispossession," above all else, refers to predatory practices outside of the capitalist system —theft—that actually resemble extractive operations already in use within the United States, practices that reinforce the currently rampant unevenness shadowing society. But the casino capitalism, Ponzi schemes and pyramid scams, n o t to forget state lotteries and the like have nothing on the looting of the S & L's and contemporary corporate corruption. A diversity of familiar predatory schemes have been employed by American economic power to fuel its own imperialism in the effort to solve the recurring crises of accumulation that simply result in exacerbating greater uneven-

25 ness throughout the globe. Yet Harvey, along with others, has still n o t distanced his own discourse sufficiently from one that has organized capitalism in successive stages leading to collapse or catastrophic implosion. H e has n o t exorcised the ghostly conviction that the state, now armed to the teeth, might conceivably wither away. It is important to recognize in these more recent Marxian theories of imperialism that they still rely on the primacy of stages and its inevitable chronology. T h i s reliance is reflected in their unmarked consensus to locate the source of the current crisis in the 1970s, a gesture which has made the decade into a fateful watershed but one safely within the temporal confines of America's Cold War. T h e consensus is, in fact, driven in part by the category of the Cold W a r itself, and indissolubly linked to its ideological defense of the "rise of the West." W h a t I am suggesting is that this chronology marking the inevitable progression of stage-ism is actually bonded to the nation-state, a category it unproblematically presupposes, rather than to the itinerary of capitalism itself which both intersects with the nation and exceeds it through expansion. It still seems to have more to do with the West, as such, than the Rest. T h i s emphasis was always at the heart of Cold War strategies, just as the staging of h o t wars elsewhere in Asia, Africa, or Latin America constituted a principal condition by which the category of Cold W a r was enabled and managed to sustain its empirical existence. W h i l e it is undoubtedly the event of 9/11 and the adventures of the American state that have recharged Marxism to reassess the phenomenon of

26 current imperial formation, confidence in structures and periodization actually work to displace historical analyses to produce a myopic vision that easily overlooks the historicity of m o r e distant moments like the immediate post-World W a r II years. Moreover, this blindness, which has nothing to do with opposing the usual fetishization of origins, too often ignores the task of interrogating the Cold W a r itself as a problematic category that frequently functioned to masquerade the promotion of what t h e n were called core economic interests and divert scrutiny away from what clearly were the formative moments of an imperialist impulse avant la lettre. To compensate for this historical nearsightedness today there has been the additional effort to envisage historical imperialisms in light of their subsequent legacies for new decolonized societies and as models that might be deployed to refigure the contemporary American imperium. At the same m o m e n t the conjuncture has begun to give rise to a renewed Marxian critique of imperialism we also stand witness to a steadily growing enunciation of its historical legacy and the-enduring consequences for the subsequent modernization of former colonies. T h e interest of this discourse lies in showing that-historical imperialism and colonialism, despite chalking up a baneful record of influence throughout Asia and Africa, have surpassed their inaugural m o m e n t to intentionally produce lasting contributions to the formation and shape of new nation states after colonization. Even though the renewed effort to rethink imperial and colonial legacies after decolonization began before ,9/11, it has been ener-

27 gized by recent events and has stepped up its own pace of production to the extent that its "leading" findings have become part of an everyday common sense doxa found everywhere in the mass media. W h a t this historiographical revival seeks to demonstrate is how imperialism and colonialism, in spite of the acknowledged oppression they inflicted on Africa and Asia, the immense appropriations and dispossessions they visited upon much of the world, and their active undermining of political economies and destruction of received cultures of reference, nevertheless introduced the benefits of modern civilization in the new form of political organization (that is to say, systems uble to deliver political stabilization), "governmentalities," and economic arrangements leading to the installation of infrastructural investments that would be later seen to have incalculable effects for the development of the new nation state. (Roland Barthes once called this kind of argument the "margarine effect.") During the early years of the Cold W a r it was a commonplace to point to Indian "democracy" as a legacy of British colonialism in the emerging struggle for the hearts and minds of the unaligned new nations. Even Japan's prewar imperialist state was made to appear as a model of political rationality, inasmuch as it equipped colonies like Korea and Formosa with a lasting modern infrastructure. W h e r e , in fact, this argument has been used earliest and most persuasively by social scientists and historians is the case of the colonies of the former Japanese empire and their "miraculous" postwar and post-colonial transformations made possible by the infrastructures directly established by

28 Japan's colonial authority and Japanese direct investm e n t in the development of Formosa and Korea. T h i s experience, as we shall see, has relied on a muscular model of Japan which, in the Cold War days, was hoisted up by social scientists and historians as an inspiring exemplar of evolutionary modernization and a mirror for developing "new nations" to follow. Closer to home, certain imperial powers like Great Britain were considered to have been presciently responsible for introducing or inducing in their colonies private investment and the benefits of the law (turning extraterritoriality into a civilizational virtue) and indeed the category of the nation-state itself, albeit its bourgeois avatar. T h e reappearance of an older theory of development, called modernization and convergence theory, and its re-articulation in scholarly literature represents a form of overdetermined compensation for the commanding role played by post-colonial discourse. Everywhere these days, it seems, a new respect is being lavishly accorded to the historical empires of the past for their foresight in shaping die future: the old Russian Czarist Empire, the Hapsburg, and even the O t t o m a n imperial configurations have all been extolled as mirror models for later multiculturalism! T h i s new, old historiography, now drawing its energy from the Iraq war and America's imperial policies, represents an assault on the post-colonial desire to re-narrativize the colonial experience by emphasizing its repressive and disabling legacies and the way in which the colonized were robbed of subjective recognition and an historical representation of their own

29 making (the "Provincializing Europe" effect). To offset this "blindness," post-colonial discourse has addressed the question of how the colonized were able to formulate subject positions and act to play a greater role than hitherto imagined in making the relationship between ruler and ruled something more than one between subject and object and a one way street. It is important to recognize that the contemporary conjuncture has produced a new "respect" for imperialism, in an exaggerated form now constituted by the fusion of an older theory of development, made possible by a paradigm promising modernization and convergence, and the recurrent reaction to post-colonial theory, its critique of the colonial experience and, above all, its claim on the future after decolonization. W i t h modernization in the 1960s and 1970s, especially, a theory of social change promoted by a liberal social science to account for the world outside EuroAmerica was joined to a program of development dedicated to exporting democracy and capitalism as a natural coupling to win over the non-aligned countries during the Cold War. In fact, the term capitalism was rarely, if ever, used; its substitutes, democracy or modernity, suggested goals which the modernizing process promised to realize. While modernization emphasized both political and economic spheres, its effacement of capitalism for modernity, as such, reflected a conviction that upheld the primacy of political organization—the nation-state form—and the availability of rational leadership over economic development, as, in fact, the necessary condition for capitalist growth and market expansion. In this respect,

30 modernization theory echoed an earlier (and later) Marxist conceit that presupposed the primacy and existence of the nation-state as the agent of economic change, rather than the trajectory of capitalist expansion itself as the principle and principal mediating political form. Driven ceaselessly by a conception of evolutionary growth, more Spencerian than historicist, privileging the survival of vestiges, values, and residues from the past, it often labored to identify prescription with description, a what ought to be with what actually is. To secure scientific authority for its analysis it n o t only made the world the object of inquiry but mandated comparison as its standard of measurement. In this way, modernization theory continued and sustained a long-standing practice in social science that had eschewed the force of mixed and uneven historical temporalizations for timeless, unilinear structural regularities and enduring patterns of values. In other words, a process without any history. After the Cold War, modernization's language of prescriptive imperatives was utilized to account for America's arrogation of greater global responsibility for policing, now that the Soviet U n i o n had been eliminated from the field of competition, and intervening wherever "democracy" and "market" were imperiled, which usually meant masking a perceived challenge to "core interests." W t h the removal of a "real" or "natural" enemy, the contest to win over the hearts and minds no longer prevailed and the urgency of exporting development was replaced by the necessity of exporting democracy as a pre-emptive measure and the best guarantee of political stability, despite

31 prevailing, received sovereignties, as the current Iraqi expedition shows. It should n o t be surprising that the strategy of pre-emptive war was already worked out in the earlier "war against drugs" which has provided no measurable success, just as the conceptualization of terror derived from the American practice in the latter days of the Cold W a r to sponsor terroristic groups as proxies in Africa, Central and Latin America, and the Middle East, notably Afghanistan and the struggle to extricate Soviet control. O n e need only remember the elder Bush's strange history with the Panamanian dictator Noriega, now in a U.S. prison, and the photograph from palmier days of the current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with a one time ally of the United States, Saddam Hussein, also in custody. T h e reaction to post-colonial discourse and its widespread institutionalization (scratch an English department and you'll find a post-colonial outpost) has been enhanced by the desire to demonstrate the great contributions made by the colonizing powers now that they have passed into the precinct of memory and nostalgia and n o w that the "historical experience" after decolonization has become heritage. T h e proponents of this counterattack against the entrenched bastions of post-colonial discourse have been enabled by appropriating from modernization theory its obsessive emphasis on the residue of surviving values used to facilitate the modernization process as an evolutionary progression, as, in fact, the agent of social change leading to the achievement of modern nationhood. Earlier practitioners of modernization theory appealed

32 to a presumed (and indefensible) binary between traditional and modern, the "then" and "now" sequences in a continuist temporal series characterized notably by the velocity of change or distance covered by a society in becoming modern, and to the adaptive capacity of survivors of the former to help negotiate the accomplishment of the latter. M o r e recent producers of imperial blather identify the colonial m o m e n t as the instigation of a history that could only lead to the subsequent modernization of former colonized societies into modern nation-states. In a certain sense this argumentation resembles a reversal of Bruno Latour's famous formulation announcing that "we have never been modern," inasmuch as the colonial inheritance would now be made to function in such a way as to show that colonies were always modern, since they were sent on this itinerary with the advent of the colonizing power. Current efforts to democratize Afghanistan and Iraq, which means Americanizing these societies as was done earlier in Japan and West Germany, still reflect the modernizing impulse of an earlier time, but without the necessity of disguising the promotion of core interests since the contest that once propelled it has ended. Moreover, the recent maneuver to "democratize" the world pre-emptively through military intervention unconstrained by competing rival powers no longer relies on the service of social science and its comparative strategies to configure its agenda but rather on a watered-down mix of Spenglerian theorizing on civilizations and varieties of Schmidtian and Straussian distrust for substantive democracy. In fact, the (Leo) Straussian

33 waltz has been the melody the current Washington administration is h u m m i n g and the music of choice for the dress balls represented by Iraq and Afghanistan. W h a t we have now is simply a form of political modernization that will make such societies receptive to market forces and American consumer products that scarcely needs to conceal its imperial aspiration. Finally, the appeal to a colonial heritage outliving its history is recruited to show n o t only what beneficial service colonizers performed, as committed altruists, but also conscripted as a model for the United States to emulate as it becomes the new imperium of the twenty-first century. But the historical model, as we shall see, was the British Empire, n o t the French, Japanese, D u t c h or even Ottoman. In this connection, it needs also be said that the category of the "Cold War," so vital for the production of a discourse and discipline called international relations, has constructed a master narrative of struggle between the West and East, "realism" and "idealism" in foreign policy, democracy and communism, recoding in a new register the older polarity between civilization and barbarism, self and other. At the heart of this narrative (still apparently taught as a serious subject in colleges and universities) is the "rise of the West" and all of its claims to unity,, fullness, and completion. By the same token, the Cold W a r master narrative manages to displace and marginalize any agency granted to the T h i r d World, seeking to incorporate it into the First World before the final elimination of the Second, reducing its constituents into shadowy abstractions, the world of the formerly colo-

34 nizefd now refitted to becoming "new nations" with American help. But the point to the Cold W a r narrative was to tell the story of how the U.S. was locked in a life-death struggle to preserve the free world. T h i s meant that its principal aim would be to repress the desire and capacity of these new nations to achieve subjectivity and agency through a third or neutral way different from either first or second worlds, a different politics and economy. In this way the Cold W a r authorized the United States to continue playing the role of agent of modernization, reinforcing wherever possible the subjectless status of the former colonized by extending aid to "develop" these societies and capitalist markets. At the same time, the United States was willing to use coercion and violence in the form of counter-terrorist espionage, clandestine operations, assassinations (remember Patrice Lumumba?), proxy wars employing terrorists and to risk even full scale war so long as it was outside of Euro-America. For the Soviets it forced greater attempts at integration within their bloc, n o t always successful as Yugoslavia, Albania, and the Sino-Soviet split of the late 1950s dramatized. Japan became the showcase of the truth of modernization, while India less so because its "democracy" was seen as "unstable," which meant n o t totally dominated by the United States (in contrast to Japan's single party "democracy") and its leadership too attracted to the lure of neutrality and a different way momentarily promised by the Bandun'g Conference.

35 I: P A R A D I G M ' S

THEORY

T h r o u g h o u t the decades of the 1960s and 1970s—as we look back today on perhaps the deepest temporal terrain of the Cold War—social science entered the world and acquired its comparative vocation through the formation of a theory of modernization and the construction of a research agenda authorized by its paradigm. Anthropology had already entered the world, so to speak, by leaving its center, and whatever comparative perspective it envisaged was invariably constrained by this location. Disciplines like political science and sociology, especially, which fastened on to developmental programs of decolonizing societies and "new nations" as suitable subject matters for research, often concentrated on the role played by elite leadership and the strategies they employed to negotiate the passage from "tradition" to "modernity." In fact, it is strangely disquieting today to be reminded of the astonishing extent of publications on modernization appearing during this time frame and how seemingly widespread its institutionalization became in education and government. W h a t truly amazes is how so much nonsense could command the time and energies of so many thoughtful people for so long. But arming social science with a global reach and a comparative method invariably meant little more than utilizing some idealized version of American society as its model of replication, a model that scarcely managed to conceal its own exceptionalism and indifference to history. Too often the research agenda was never far

w 36 from considerations of policy-desire for the formulation of developmental programs promoted by the American state. T h e trajectory of modernizing development provided a template against which to measure the "progress" or achievement accomplished by a society and what still needed to be done to accelerate or complete the itinerary. T h e importance of modernization theory, constructed from a neo-evolutionary narrative, lay in its claims to universality, a process of rational achievement that one writer optimistically described as a "universal solvent." In a nutshell the modernizing paradigm's theory rested on a number of "ideal typical" traits: societies were seen as constituted into coherently organized systems whose "subsystems," as the followers of Talcott Parsons called them, were interdependent; societies all followed a scheme of historical development that consisted of the movem e n t (transition?) from tradition to modern that would determine the nature of their social subsystems, with modernity referring to rational, scientific, secular, and Western and tradition signifying the absence of these characteristics and more; and traditional societies, owing to the lack of fullness identified with the completed Self (the West), would resort to the route of modernization—the historical evolution to modernity—with the likelihood of success through resources capable of assisting a process of "adaptive upgrading" (as Jeffrey Alexander calls it).

w 37 T h e A m b i t i o n of P o s t - W a r Social Science It should be recognized that modernization theory grew out of two impulses in the post-World W a r II period. O n e was the acknowledgement that social theory and the construction of appropriate research agendas confronted an altered environment that demanded accounting for the greater complexity of the globe, especially in view of the consequences of the recent conflict. War's end brought the beginning of a decolonizing process and the appearance of new nation-states in its wake in Africa and Asia; it also produced the need to address the social change such momentous transformations represented and even measure the progress of this ongoing program as it resulted in the proliferation of a number of independent and autonomous societies. T h e changed intellectual and political landscape required envisaging theories that were able to explain the rates of change and development taking place in an implicitly dynamic, comparative framework. At virtually the'same m o m e n t a second factor was insinuated into the scene. While decolonization was moving along, the globe was polarized into two contending camps that represented different, competing routes to industrial modernity. W i t h the Soviet Union and its promise of realizing a socialist modernity, Marxism offered both an explanatory strategy that claimed to account for changes over time and the prospect of successful, revolutionary transformation independent of capital-

T 38 ism and its presumed evolutionary trajectory. T h e United States, as the leading nation of the capitalist world after World W a r II, and the Soviet Union's principal competitor in the contest to win over the new, recently decolonized, unaligned nations for its path of modernization, promoted political democracy (with a capitalist component, to be sure) as the model of rational modernity, driven by a strategy of evolutionary development. In fact, it was in the immediate post-World W a r II context that the developmental strategies of both the United States and the Soviet U n i o n were formulated and fine-tuned into explicit state policies leading to the exportation-of aid and assistance to new nations; they were directed at "upgrading" the modernizing process and assuring it of rapid success. Modernization, in this respect, became a conception of social change powering the movement of societies from the putatively deadening stand-still of static traditions to the dynamic pace of modernity. By the same measure it was also increasingly perceived by leaders and elites of new nations as a prescriptive policy designated to actualize those changes calculated to achieve the vaunted goal of modernity. T h i s task,-more often than not, fell to a group of "Westernized" technocrats more committed to technology than to the blandishments of middle class political democracy. In other words, modernization was envisioned as a policy of planning for transforming "traditional" societies into modern nations by emulating examples of rational achievement and advancement by pressing for, at any cost, the realization of political stability. In this way, it constituted a

T^ 39 policy choice initiated by both elites of new nations to complete the decolonizing process and the two, competing world powers which immediately embarked upon promoting their respective, ambitious developmental projects in the ensuing contest. W h a t this demand prompted was a rethinking of social science itself along the lines of fulfilling the desire, read as necessity, to accommodate research to the new, global circumstances. In the United States until the end of the war, a good deal of social science was weighted down by an approach that sought to emphasize the static countenance of societies and the durable identity of national character or personality derived from repetitive socialization. W h a t plainly was overlooked in the "culture and personality school," as it was called, was, of course, the primacy accorded to the nation form as a framework for social research. T h e category of nation was presented as an unproblematic presupposition defining the spatial boundary of research (and socialization) as a timeless zone that made n o distinction between a past, present, and future. Such an approach was, by nature, unhistorical or even anti-historical and indifferent to change as a significant process. Reflecting, perhaps, unstated claims of American exceptionalism and its own insensitivity to history (a genuine modernist conceit), this approach to social science was.incapable of supplying an adequate theory of social change (a necessity already dramatized by war) that could compete with Marxism. Its last, and lasting gasp, was expressed by anthropologists like Ruth Benedict whose Chrysanthemum and the Sword

40 (1947), which, aided by a Nietzschean inspired binary, explained Japanese behavior as a manifestation of an unchanging and endless reproduction of a "shame culture" (as against a Western "guilt culture") and Frances Hsu whose book called In the Shadow of the Ancestor managed to make contemporary Chinese identical with their Bronze Age predecessors. Ultimately, the deficiency was filled by structuralfunctionalism and its willingness to faintly nod toward history and its promise to explain the itinerary of social change from tradition bound past to a modern, advancing present. In time this slight concession to history was compromised when functionalist social science coupled'description with prescription in the 1950s and 1960s to meet the demands of policy desire. But it is, nonetheless, important to recall that even though functionalism initially had shown indifference to historical analysis and comparability, its elevation as America's Cold W a r social science required acquisition of a methodological strategy n